BACKGROUND: In modern psychiatry, deinstitutionalization of mentally ill became an essential part of improving state of being of those affected. Integration in community, despite obvious benefits, led to increase in social distance and rejection towards mentally ill. Social stigma affects different life domains of those afflicted, and therefore it is crucial to introduce methods to deal with it. Our objective was to assess and compare psychiatrists' and public attitudes and beliefs about mentally ill people...

In The Mind of Modernism, Mark Micale demonstrates the ubiquity of the concept of hysteria in the French imagination at the turn of the century. Taking this approach as our starting point, our study attempts to determine if the notion of degeneration played a similar role in the interactions of psychiatry, culture and politics in Quebec. Our analysis of a variety of historical sources demonstrates that the concept of degeneration did indeed penetrate aspects of psychiatric nosology, medical literature, news media, fiction, and political discourse in Quebec...

The EANM 2015 Annual Congress, held from October 10th to 14th in Hamburg, Germany, was outstanding in many respects. With 5550 participants, this was by far the largest European congress concerning nuclear medicine. More than 1750 scientific presentations were submitted, with more than 250 abstracts from young scientists, indicating that the future success of our discipline is fuelled by a high number of young individuals becoming involved in a multitude of scientific activities. Significant improvements have been made in molecular imaging of cancer, particularly in prostate cancer...

Clinicians have long known that successful psychotherapy, including successful psychodynamic psychotherapy, depends upon the interaction between therapist and patient. In other words, it is important to have a strong therapeutic alliance. This article presents the history of the concept of the therapeutic alliance (TA). It also explores three areas of research that have bearing on the TA. The importance of the TA and the extensive research work that pertains to it hold promise for psychodynamic psychiatry, both in terms of understanding, and in the treatment of mental suffering...

Mass media including television, internet, and newspapers influences public views about various issues by means of how it covers an issue. Newspapers have a wider reach and may affect the impact that a news story has on the reader by factors such as placement of the story within the different pages. We did a pilot study to see how two English newspapers from Mumbai, India were covering psychiatry related news stories. The study was done over a period of 3 months. We found a total of 870 psychiatry related news stories in the two newspapers over 3 months with the majority of them being covered in the main body of the newspapers...

The use of psychotropic medications for children and adolescents with attention and depression problems continues to generate both attention in the news media and controversy within the field. Given that the United Kingdom has recently issued guidelines for its national health service that differ substantially from those in the United States, the time is ripe to reexamine the evidence. The purpose of this article is to describe the UK's new "stepped care" guidelines for treating attention and depression problems in children and to compare them to the US guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry...

BACKGROUND: There is limited information about the prevalence of unethical behavior and how is perceived among health care providers. The aim of this study is to assess such behavior and how is perceived. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is a cross-sectional study among three groups of professionals. Total participants were 370 and included medical staff, medical residents, and nurses in five medical specialties in four tertiary hospitals in Saudi Arabia (two Ministry of Health Hospitals and two military Hospitals)...

Concerns regarding ethics of psychiatric research were a critical point in research when lots of news was announced about human rights abuses in the Nazi Germany. However, even nowadays, psychiatric research involving people suffering from different types of psychiatric disorders can still be distorted and, rather than fulfilling its promise of improved understanding of psychiatric disorder and its treatment, can result in serious harm to patients who participated in these investigations. This review focuses on some important ethical aspects in psychiatric research...

Publication bias undermines the integrity of the evidence base by inflating apparent drug efficacy and minimizing drug harms, thus skewing the risk-benefit ratio. This paper reviews the topic of publication bias with a focus on drugs prescribed for psychiatric conditions, especially depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism. Publication bias is pervasive; although psychiatry/psychology may be the most seriously afflicted field, it occurs throughout medicine and science. Responsibility lies with various parties (authors as well as journals, academia as well as industry), so the motives appear to extend beyond the financial interests of drug companies...

The renewal of the philosophical debate in psychiatry is one exciting news of recent years. However, its use in psychopharmacology may be problematic, ranging from self-confinement into the realm of values (which leaves the evidence-based domain unchallenged) to complete rejection of scientific evidence. In this paper philosophy is conceived as a conceptual audit of clinical psychopharmacology. Its function is to criticise the epistemological and methodological problems of current neopositivist, ingenuously realist and evidence-servant psychiatry from within the scientific stance and with the aim of aiding psychopharmacologists in practicing a more self-aware, critical and possibly useful clinical practice...

What's new in addiction medicine in 2012? The news are presented according three axes: first, in the field of neuroscience, the process of extinction of addiction memories. Then in the clinical field, a reflexion is reported on how to treat addiction in psychiatric hospitals. At last, in the area of teaching, an e-learning development with a virtual patient shows a great interest in addiction psychiatry.

Psychosocial oncology is an upcoming area of interest, which deals with numerous psychiatric, psychological, and social aspects of malignancies. Psychiatric oncology relates to some of the common psychological and emotional problems encountered in persons with malignancy and their formal and informal caregivers. This oration will discuss the importance of this field of Consultation Liaison Psychiatry, with a focus on the research and practice in the Indian setting. This presentation will also share the findings and researches of the presenter...

Psychiatry and mental healthcare in the Netherlands has a long history of institutional care, slowly more adapted to the community, but differentiated from mainstream healthcare in terms of organization and remuneration. It is in a crucial phase of reconsideration. Along with harsh cuts on the budgets in healthcare, the field is in transition where training is concerned. The good news is that in fruitful cooperation the government and all spcialist parties involved in mental healthcare are on the verge of reaching an important agreement that should make mental healthcare more patient centred, affordable and accessible for those who need it...

News confronts us daily with various traumatic events, like armed conflict, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, not to mention the cases of abuse and incest. The impact of these traumas on the psychological development of children is often very important and we can observe among them, symptoms of severe mental traumatisms immediately and sometimes deferred. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the existence of this disorder by children, to develop its symptoms and its possible developments, and to address the different therapeutic approaches...

The first real news about the Psychoanalysis in Spain was spread by Ortega y Gasset in 1911 and the neuropsychiatrists Valle Aldabalde and especially Fernández Sanz also spread that information in the medical world in 1914. It was introduced in the University field by Novoa Santos. The castilian edition of the works written by Freud aroused great interest, more cultural than professional, among the psychiatrists in Madrid, who were at that time very much influenced by Cajal and the German Psychiatry; Fernández Sanz made an understanding review about those works while Fernández Villaverde was not interested in them and made an ideological negation...

The 2009 news in medicine regarding dependence confirm the bio-psycho-social field of addiction medicine and psychiatry. First a statement is made about the risk of cardiac arythmy in opioid substitution treatments. Then a review of the treatment of C hepatitis shows its importance in an addicted population. In the field of cognitive neuroscience, progress has been made in the knowledge of "craving" and of its endophenotypical components. Electronic medias related disorders are on the border of addiction: a case study is exploring this new domain...

Communication research and investigations into the delivery of bad news are uncommon in psychiatry versus other medical specialties. The question of delivering "bad" diagnostic news in psychiatry has been focused on dementia rather than actual psychiatric disorders and their sequelae. Common problems are that psychiatrists avoid dealing with patients' emotional reactions to bad news and that they avoid providing a clear diagnosis for fear that patients or carers will be distressed. This article aims to provide an overview of key elements of the "breaking bad news" literature, teasing out factors that are relevant to psychiatric practice...

OBJECTIVE: In 2002, the Medical Licensing Board prescribed fundamental changes in medical education. The reformed curriculum set its focus on bed-side teaching in small groups, problem-based courses, and training of communication skills. The previous curriculum did not include the teaching of communication skills to future physicians. Physicians thus felt unprepared for the doctor-patient communication. METHOD: Within the newly derived Medical Curriculum Munich (MeCuMLMU), the School of Medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich implemented in 2005 a teaching unit named "Breaking Bad News" in order to train the students' communication skills...